Blue
by Fwe
Summary: He was a phoenix, bright as fire, and as fallen as an angel. [Kuja]


_**Blue**_

Disclaimer: I don't own Final Fantasy IX

A/N: First, thanks to _Shido21_ for the beta job. You're the best! Interestingly enough, I've never really cared for Kuja all that much. _And _- interestingly enough - this entire fic is about him. ;) Even if you don't like him, I urge you to continue. You might like the fic, even if you don't like him. Just advice. :) Have fun! It's a little strange.

**Concrit loves me. I love it. Help feed the addiction, will you?**

0O0

* * *

_It was raining._

* * *

…_Your companions made it…?_

* * *

_(time…)_

Kuja stood at the edge of eternity and gazed into the abyss below.

He smiled down at the world through a crimson spyglass, tucked in a world of red and dark. What were there but plans ahead? What sort of things could he expect?

Oh he was so old now and ready for the world to bow at his feet. Hello, your grace; Good day, your majesty.

He'd leave a mark; a powerful mark like a wound in the side of the world. The teeth marks he'd leave would make it bleed and then it would be gone, too. And would anyone try to stop him? No.

No, of course not. He'd have his power and his freedom, and who would dare to stop him?

He was an angel, after all, to their pitiful nothing.

He smiled.

Terra had never been as red as this…

* * *

**Gaia and **_**Terra**_

* * *

…_You still have time…_

* * *

He was young and like his brother, standing against a backdrop of blue with nothing but the wall behind his shoulder. 

Jealousy bit at him deep, like a serpent, drawing his ambitions to a glossy nothing until there was only a barrel of expectations lost in him.

He stared at him - the new angel - and pushed himself off the wall. He sought out Garland, crawling inside from top to bottom.

There was only one angel in Heaven. There would only _be _one angel. And he intended to be the one that stayed. The little boy was nothing… nothing!

The old man wouldn't be spoiling his plans. No. No, of course not.

He smiled to himself, and plotted silently.

* * *

…_I thought I told you to go…_

* * *

He was younger and there was no one to compare himself to. Just the others that were no one and still nothing to be compared to him. If he cared, he could kill them, and no one would care or know. Garland wouldn't care - why would he miss a couple when there were _so many_? Of himself, he didn't care - why ever would he have to? All tails swishing and empty eyes staring away; they could all die and they wouldn't even know it. So what was the point? 

He tried it.

Red on white, red on blue. Spilling and swirling, drop, drop, drop into the still looking-glass water. He could see his face in the redness and the blue and it dulled the pain of seeing the world slightly. That glare of azure…

True, he didn't care if they died. True, he didn't know why he should. True, there was nothing else to do with his days so he stalked them and no one went on caring.

Plotting their downfall, one by one, until there was a new batch and he could keep on going until Garland had it right - until the perfect batch came along to carry the perfect souls. It was such a fun game to play - when the rain didn't fall and he could stalk silently and with such fervour.

Gaia and Terra. Hm…

The rain never fell on Terra.

* * *

…_I'm glad…_

* * *

He stood in Oeilvert, watching the stained glass fireglow dance upon his skin. What was it that made the sun so bright? He tallied the minutes in his head, carried the monster cries behind him in through the tall doors. 

Inside, there was a civilization recorded - one that still was but wasn't and never would be.

He was older now and it was beautiful to know.

What was it there, among the runes, which made his spine snap in appreciation? Made his tail flicker when it wasn't supposed to even exist?

He held the soul of someone long dead in his body. Had they seen the same things that he saw now? Hah… _they_? Had _he_ seen these things before?

No. No, of course not. He was not someone else. Not a reincarnation of someone else. He had a soul, the others didn't, but… he was the one, the only one - the world's justice, the angel of death. Had he had such great plans in another life?

(The souls of the sleeping world…)

No. No, of course not. He wouldn't be himself now if he had. He would have succeeded far back in time…

Silently, he grinned to himself, a small, fragile-white thing.

Plans were to be made…

On Gaia.

* * *

_Plans… he'd had such lonesome, wretched plans…_

* * *

Ah, was life so short? Was it so very, very disappointing? Very… tiresome… 

A palace full of dust carried out his dreams, full of wormwood books and dusty miles of glass. Paned beauty - that's what he possessed. Cool, paned beauty of pastel ancientness bottled into walls that were burning desert-hot on the outside.

Mages spilled around in crisscrossed methodology, hats and hands working nothing while they went in their empty-cobweb minds.

He stayed in his dark basement place, where the wind wasn't and the sun was so dark it could neither shine things red nor blue. There, he made his Mages, one by one, while the factories went on making them elsewhere too, in hushed numbers, unknown to the masses. The ones that came out writhing and wrong… well…

Nothing on white, nothing on the red of his palms.

There was no rain in the desert, after all… and what of killing soulless things?

He smiled. What of killing souled things?

Holding a hat in his hands. Waiting for a moment.

No. No, not a moment… the end of all moments.

The world would Stop at his feet before he was through with it.

Gaia, Terra, Gaia.

* * *

Garland had spoken. Come in, tide, ebb. It crashed against his dumbstruck mind and frayed his thoughts a little. 

What did that fool know? He could have said anything, just out of hate. Out of loathing and squirming self-satisfaction and the need to hear his own voice just one last time before he died.

What did Kuja care for it?

He… What did he care… when…

…Lies…

_Even as you die, you'll have died without ever leaving your mark on the world..._

* * *

He was a metronome ticking out of control. First one way he lashed and then another, all fire and wanting things dead. 

_"Why should the world exist without me? That wouldn't be fair."_

He laughed. Oh, what sort of changes the plans could take.

* * *

The sting of it. The horrid, mindless ache. 

What had he done? He was fallen - a withered ash and watching as death rose to meet them.

The end of all things, where the screaming, howling monsters in the abyss came from the nothing lived like gnats on methane-grunge. He lay in paralysis, listening to the stars explode above him and the hum of the End-Things.

They were singing to him, long and low and high and sweet and he covered his ears in pain.

Oh… was this what he had wanted?

Snapped necks, releasing phantoms into the cycle, gone spirits into the nether of a hill at the end of all things…

Was this what he had wanted?

_(For no life is more insincere than that lived as a masquerade.)_

Was this the beyond?

His brother, oh… his brother was up there in the height, exploding like a super nova with the children and the rest of the hope that was left. He could smell their ashes - burnt clothes and hair and nails and skin - and they fought. Fought with nailless hands and blind eyes and bald, burnt heads and nothing but their lives…

_(I won't have to die alone.)_

He clenched the ground, holding the crest of a deadly hill like a feeble fallen hero.

Fallen? Had he been so high up?

An angel fallen. Hah…

He stood, watching as death fell - so, the second angel was triumphant. Did that mean that he could have killed death, too? Slowly, his breath hot, his mind was crawling with a thousand little mage hats and genome writhing tails.

Had he been wrong? Had they held the same fears that he had?

Had he… Hah.

Well, there was no rain in damnation, either…

He smiled.

Mouth in a silent slit of powerful fire, he spoke the name of death itself and then to his brother who wasn't a brother but a man while he was something fallen and in a cess.

In the dredges, he rose up, a firebird, and watched the world shake. A simple word, he watched them all disappear.

Teleportation… Was that all he had had left? All hot, all burning, all ready to let things live, he fell from Memoria's graces and into a plundering darkness. The poison of the tree of life…

Phoenix. He was a phoenix.

He was nowhere…

* * *

**He'd had such… lovely… lovely, wondrous plans…**

* * *

He had seen the elephant-lady die. 

He had been not so young and not so old, but not so very living…

He had known nothing of the future but that one day there would be no future and that he would break the cycle he had been made to continue…

He had… what had he done?

_What had he done?_

The blue-light swallowed him up and he breathed in pure mist. White and soft and so chillingly wet… full of monsters…

The light had hurt his eyes - the blue of it, the harshness and the sharpness. Terra had been so sterile. What had Garland expected to grow? Handless, heartless monsters? Lazy warmongers… wonderful inventors… people who would not remember living, just as he couldn't remember his past life.

He wasn't a new soul. He had been someone else… Garland had taken one from the back of the line; a shopkeeper or a reader or a writer or a- a something. Something experimental and curdled and sour. He owned a curdled soul and didn't remember the last time it had lived…

What had Garland expected?

* * *

It was so wet there, and angel soft, like a feather's breath upon his skin. 

What was it, why was it, where was it, how -

Oh.

_(there was blood on the walls)_

He could feel his own singed fingers and the nails that didn't lie there any longer. He gazed at them through the nether haze and the wondering bright blue of the light.

There was something still against his leg, hard and soft and warm. His fingers curled, grasping at the last of the sunlight, and he moved, something in the back of his battered skull clicking and crackling like a bag of spilling rice.

Or was it like the rain? Soft, sweet, warm and clicking against the cobbles…

Oh, he'd liked the rain the first time he had seen it. On Gaia, it seemed to rain all of the time. When the skies would get heavy and purple and gray, what would he do?

Sit out on the balcony and watch and wait, half expecting the deathbringer to bring down his eye for the world to see and burn under. The sky would crack open, gray misty shell as fragile as an egg, and down it would come - life.

_Rain. _

_(Thrum, thrum. Thrum, thrum.)_

Such a paradox, the two things that could descend. Death was all fire and coolness and on his first night of seeing such Life, he had found it… what had he found?

_Warmth._

Warmth like the feeling that had been growing in his chest. Warmth like the living thing lying at his feet. Warmth like the inside of the Iifa tree and -

Was he lying in it?

He turned his eyes, watching the walls - red spattered walls - go green, go up for miles or more.

At his feet sat a phoenix, burnt out - a brother who was so like the sun.

_(Did that make him the moon?)_

"Zidane," he said and reached a hand forward. Finger-chipped, bone bitten, he touched him, not feeling the firepain or hearing the hiss of his life as it dripped drop by drop to the ground. It was red and clean as the rain.

_Warm. _

"I'm sorry," he whispered, looking down at the boy. All porcelain stained and smiling cracked, he tried to hold his hand. He was so warm beneath his touch. "I hadn't realized."

_One, two, three, four. Drop, drop, drop._ The tree of life spun around him and he tried not to breathe too hard. The warmth was only growing in his chest, as hot as a star's tear, and he held his other hand there, reveling in it.

He hadn't realized, until the end… why?

"I was wrong," he laughed, leaning back into the belly of the tree. "Wrong…" Oh, it was a joke, wasn't it? He finally understood why he needed to live, and he was going to die. Well, Garland had been right. He never could win.

He sighed, exhaling a mouthful of warmth. His brother breathed, full of heat and fading life.

Why had he come to save him? Why would he bother?

An ex-angel of death, one curdled- wasted; a thing that should have never been made. And he'd killed the soulful as if they were soulless, seeking to end a pain that they didn't hold.

And wasn't that the joke of it? He'd never had any pain, either. He'd made it all up, every inch of his wanting and his need to understand. He'd stretched and stretched and _stretched _up toward the stars and the endless nothing that he saw behind him, and didn't think to stop before he thought too far ahead. It had all been useless, his worrying and his search. He'd made his pain and he'd drunken it like wine.

Like water - like rainwater, like Life. Iifa…

So the cycle continued.

He looked down at his brother, inching himself through his blue haze that had nothing to do with the sunlight.

"Well," he whispered, hoarse and laughed again. What a fine way to die, warm and mute and speaking to the deaf. "Would you have done the same, had I not gotten rid of you?" he paused, thinking, "Would you have succeeded, brother?"

Garland had said that Zidane had been stronger, made the perfect angel of death, but what had he killed? What had he snapped dead?

He'd killed the deathbringer and stolen his chariot, but what had he done with it? He'd lived, and lived, and lived until it made Kuja sore to think of how the boy had tried to make the living keep on. Keep on living, keep on going, keep on…

It was raining.

Up miles and miles above, where the darkness went on forever, starless - the rain fell, cool against his skin.

_Drop, drop, drop. One, two, three, four. _

He smiled at it, closing his eyes.

"Would you have, brother?"

No, no… of course not. His brother was an angel, but a different sort entirely. He grasped his hand again, nearly spent and nearly, nearly dead.

The drops fell, drop drop, and he shut his eyes, feeling his brother's heartbeat in his skin.

_Thrum, thrum. Thrum, thrum. _

_(like a bird)_

"Zidane," he said and cast Curaga. The pulse beat through his veins.

_Thrum, thrum. Thrum, thrum. _What was that feeling? That lifebeat?

_Thrum, thrum. Thrum, thrum._ He had one of his own.

_Thrum, thrum. Thrum, thrum._ But Kuja was lifeless - _thrum, thrum thrum, thrum _- and it was only the rain.

_Thrum, thrum. _

* * *

He had existed, not knowing. 

The angel of death, not living. The angel of death, never alive.

What had he done?

…_What had he done?_

With his last breath, he'd held a life… and saved.

What angel was he?

* * *

**Gaia, Terra.**

* * *

_The rain was so warm._

* * *

0O0 

A/N: Das Ende.

The sequence of events is a bit out of order (purposely). I love trying out new writing styles! All reviews appreciated. :) **Concrit much more so. **


End file.
